What happens to my bills when a new session starts?

As Congress, the states, or the District of Columbia transition to a new legislative session, FiscalNote will also reflect these new legislative sessions throughout the platform. In the case of Issues, we recommend keeping in mind how we classify certain session transitions—if the session is annual, biennium, or biennial—to better inform how you organize your bills during these time periods. We explain those session types here.

For bills that you’ve added to a Issue in the first year of a biennium—good news! These bills will stay in your view of Current Sessions for your Issues for the duration of the biennium, and you will continue to receive Issue alerts on bill activity according to your notification preferences.

All other bills will be removed from your Current Sessions view in Issues, and FiscalNote will no longer be adding new information to those particular bill pages.

If you do expect a bill to be reintroduced, you should expect to receive a Discovery Alert on that bill, assuming one of your Discovery Alerts caught the identical bill from the previous year, and from there you can add that new bill to an Issue.

At FiscalNote we endeavor to standardize, simplify, and make legislative information accessible to all. You can see how we define the length of state session terms by going to Search and expanding the Sessions filter dropdown at the left, and we hope that this information enables you to better manage your Issues when we transition to new sessions.